Not sure why I never did this before. It was amazingly easy, and could have come in handy with a lot of the stuff I was doing last year. This is a Window SWF panel which allows you to easily enter special characters into Flash text fields.
To use, download the zip file (link below), unzip to the WindowSWF directory in your Flash Configuration directory. Restart Flash. Choose the menu item: Window/Other Panels/Special Characters.
When open, the panel shows 128 characters at a time. You can choose a range to display, and choose the font to display them in. There’s a little magnification thing going on there to help you see them better. (Sorry for the crappy jpg. It’s really nice and clean in real life!)
Also, the panel remembers the last range you selected, so if you are doing a lot of work with Chinese characters, you don’t have to click up into the 35,000’s each time.
When you click on a character, it creates a new text field on the stage, filling it with that character. All currently selected text attributes will be used.
Clicking another character will create another text field, with that character.
However, if you have are currently editing a text field, clicking a new character will insert that character at the insertion point in that text field.
With this, you can easily type out whole sentences in the language of your choice.
Of course, it is up to you to make sure that the font in text field you are using supports the characters that you are inputting, and of course, you should embed the font as needed. The panel is merely an input tool.
Oh, I should also note that the way the panel works is by copying the character to the clipboard, and then pasting it into Flash. So the last-clicked character will also remain in your clipboard, in the event that you want to paste it someplace else.
Download it here: http://www.bit101.com/specialcharacters/spechars.zip
any chance it works on a mac too? i suppose i could just DL and try, but i figured i’d ask first.
A window swf is merely a swf. As cross-platform as any other swf.
hi,
I haven’t tested it yet, but there is no doubt it’s an excelent idea.
As I see these kind of questions asked a lot at Flashkit.com, I thought it would be nice having the unicode escape sequence and the url-encoded value displayed somewhere when a character is selected.
Just a suggestion in case you have the time and interest, and it’s doable…
Actually, I made something like that a long time ago. http://www.bit-101.com/specialchars/UniConvert.swf
Also a Window SWF
Thanks Keith. Do you have plans to make this into a component for use in online sites? Something akin to the map at Start > Accessories > System Tools > Character Map. Or like the one in Microsoft Word > Insert > Symbol.
I hadn’t thought about making a component, but that’s a good idea.